by Ben Bova
Completely destroyed the ship and killed everybody aboard, he repeated to himself. What a weapon those little bugs could make!
ORE CARRIER STARLIGHT
Starlight was an independent freighter. For years it had plied between Ceres and Selene, taking on cargoes of ore in the Belt and carrying them on a slow, curving ellipse to the waiting factories on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Its owners, a married couple from Murmansk, had kept strictly aloof from the big corporations, preferring to make a modest living out of carrying ores and avoiding entanglements. Their crew consisted of their two sons and daughters-in-law. On their last trip to Selene they had tarried a week longer than usual so that their first grandchild—a girl— could be born in the lunar city’s hospital. Now, after a trip with the squalling new baby to the Belt, they were returning to Selene, happy to be away from the fighting that had claimed so many Astro and HSS ships.
The Astro drone had no proper name, only a number designation: D-6. The D stood for “destroyer.” It was an automated vessel, remotely controlled from Astro’s offices in Selene. The controllers’ assignment was to attack any HSS vessels approaching the Moon. The particular controller on duty that morning had a list of HSS ships in her computer, complete with their names, performance ratings, and construction specifications. She suspected that Starlight was a disguised version of a Humphries freighter and spent most of the morning scanning the vessel with radar and laser probes.
Astro’s command center was kept secret from Humphries’s people, of course; it was also kept secret from the government of Selene, which insisted that no hostilities should take place in its jurisdiction. So the controller watched Starlight passively, without trying to open up a communications link with the freighter or even asking the International Astronautical Authority offices about the ship’s registration and identity.
To her credit, the Astro controller instructed D-6 to obtain close-up imagery of the approaching freighter. Unfortunately, the destroyer’s programming was new and untried; the drone had been rushed into use too soon. The onboard computer misinterpreted the controller’s order. Instead of a low-power laser scan, the destroyer hit Starlight with a full-intensity laser beam that sawed the vessel’s habitation module neatly in half, killing everyone aboard.
Pancho was heading for the Moon’s south pole when the news of the Starlight fiasco reached her.
She was flying in a rocket on a ballistic trajectory to the Astro power station set on the summit of the highest peak in the Malapert Mountains. Taller than Everest, Mt. Dickson’s broad, saddle-shaped summit was always in sunlight, as were its neighboring peaks. Astro workers had covered its crest with power towers topped by photovoltaic cells. The electricity they generated was carried back to Selene by cryogenically cooled cables of lunar aluminum that ran across the rugged, crater-pocked highlands for nearly five thousand kilometers.
For the few brief minutes of the rocket’s arcing flight southward, the handful of passengers hung weightlessly against their seat restraint straps. To her surprise, Pancho actually felt a little queasy. You’ve been flying a desk too long, girl. She thought about how the future growth of the Moon would almost certainly be in the polar regions. Water deposits were there, she knew, and you could build power towers that were always in sunlight, so you got uninterrupted electricity, except for Earth eclipses, but that was only a few minutes out of the year. It was a mistake to build Selene near the equator, she thought.
Back in those days, though, it started as a government operation. Moonbase. Some bean-counting sumbitch of a bureaucrat figured it’d be a couple of pennies cheaper in propellant costs to build near the equator than at either polar region. They picked Alphonsus because there were vents in the crater floor that outgassed methane now and then. Big lollapalooza deal! Water’s what you need, and the ice deposits at the poles are where the water is. Even so, it isn’t enough. We have to import water from the rock rats.
As the rocket vehicle fired its retros in preparation for landing at the Astro base, Pancho caught a glimpse through her passenger window of the construction already underway at Shackleton Crater, slightly more than a hundred kilometers distant. Nairobi’s found the money they needed, she told herself. She had followed their progress in the weekly reports her staff made, but seeing the actual construction sprawling across the floor of Shackleton impressed her more than written reports or imagery. Where’s their money coming from? she asked herself. Her best investigators had not been able to find a satisfactory answer.
She had brought one of the new nanomachine space suits with her, folded and packed in her travel bag. Stavenger had even supplied her with a nanofabric helmet that could be blown up like a toy balloon. Pancho packed it but firmly decided that if she had to use the softsuit she’d find a regular bubble helmet to go with it.
There was no need for a space suit. Once the ballistic rocket touched down, a flexible tunnel wormed from the base’s main airlock to the ship’s hatch. Pancho walked along its spongy floor to the airlock, where the director of the base was waiting for her, looking slightly nervous because he wasn’t entirely sure why the company’s CEO had suddenly decided to visit his domain.
Pancho allowed him to tour her through the base, which looked to her a lot like most of the other lunar facilities she had seen. It was almost entirely underground; the work on the surface of maintaining the solar cells and building new ones was done by robotic machines tele-operated from the safety of the underground offices.
“Of course, we’re not as luxurious down here as Selene,” the base director explained in a self-deprecating tone, “but we do have the basic necessities.”
With that, he ushered Pancho into a tight, low-ceilinged conference room that was crowded with his senior staff people, all of them anxious to meet the CEO and even more anxious to learn why she had come to see them. The conference table was set with sandwiches and drinks, with a scale model of the base sitting in the middle of the table.
There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so Pancho remained standing, munched on a sandwich, sipped at a plastic container of fruit juice, and chatted amiably with the staff—none of whom dared to sit down while the CEO remained standing.
At last she put her emptied juice container back on the table. As if on signal, all conversations stopped and everyone turned toward her.
She grinned at them. “I guess you’re wondering why I dropped in on y’all like this,” Pancho said, reverting to her west Texas drawl to put them at their ease. “It’s not every day that the chief of the corporation comes to see us,” the base director replied. A few people tittered nervously.
“Well,” said Pancho, “to tell the truth, I’m curious ’bout what your new neighbors are up to. Any of you know how to get me invited over to the Nairobi complex?”
SELENE NEWS MEDIA CENTER
Despite its rather glitzy title, the news media center was little more than a set of standard-sized offices—most of them crammed with broadcasting equipment—and one cavernous studio large enough to shoot several videos at the same time.
Edith Stavenger stood impatiently just inside the studio’s big double doors, waiting while the camera crew finished its final take on a training vid for the new softsuits. A young woman who actually worked a tractor on the surface was serving as a model, showing how easy it was to pull the suit on and seal its front.
Many years earlier Edith Stavenger had been Edie Elgin, a television news reporter in Texas, back in the days when the first human expedition to Mars was in training. She had come to the Moon as a reporter during the brief, almost bloodless lunar war of independence. She had married Douglas Stavenger and never returned to Earth. She still had the dynamic, youthful good looks of a cheerleader, golden blonde hair and a big smile full of strong bright teeth. She was still bright-eyed and vigorous, thanks to rejuvenation therapies that ranged from skin-cell regeneration to hormone enhancement. Some thought that she had taken nanomachines into her body, like her husband, but Edith found no ne
ed for that; cellular biochemistry was her fountain of youth.
She had served as news director for Selene for a while but, at her husband’s prodding, semi-retired to a consultant’s position. Doug Stavenger wanted no dynasties in Selene’s political or social structure and Edith agreed with him, almost completely. She clung to her consultant’s position, even though she barely ever tried to interfere with the operation of the news media in Selene.
But now she had a reason to get involved, and she waited with growing impatience for the head of the news department to finish the scene he was personally directing.
The young model took off her fishbowl helmet and collapsed the transparent inflatable fabric in her hands. Then she unsealed her soft-suit, peeled it off her arms and wriggled it past her hips. She’d be kind of sexy, Elgin thought, if she weren’t wearing those coveralls.
At last the scene was finished, the crew clicked off their handheld cameras, and the news director turned and headed for the door.
“Edie!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you’d come up here.”
“We’ve got to talk, Andy.”
The news director’s name was Achmed Mohammed Wajir, and although he traced his family roots back to the Congo, he had been born in Syria and raised all over the Middle East. His childhood had been the gypsy existence of a diplomat’s son: never in one city for more than two years at a time. His father sent him to Princeton for an education in the classics, but young Achmed had fallen in love with journalism instead. He went to New York and climbed through the rough-and-tumble world of the news media until a terrorist bomb shattered his legs. He came to Selene where he could accept nanotherapies that rebuilt his legs, but he could never return to Earth while he carried nanomachines inside him. Wajir soon decided he didn’t care. The Moon’s one-sixth g made his recovery easier, and at Selene the competition in the news business was even gentler than the gravity.
As they pushed through the studio’s double doors and out into the corridor, Wajir began, “If it’s about this Starlight accident—”
“Accident?” Elgin snapped. “It’s a tragedy. Seven innocent people killed, one of them a baby.”
“We played the story, Edie. Gave it full coverage.”
“For a day.”
Wajir had once been slim as a long-distance runner, but years behind a desk—or a restaurant table —had thickened his middle. Still, he was several centimeters taller than Elgin and now he drew himself up to his full height.
“Edie,” he said, “we’re in the news business, and Starlight is old news. Unless you want to do some sob-sister mush. But even there, there’s no relatives left to cry on camera for you. No funeral. The bodies have drifted to god knows where by now.”
Edith’s normal cheerful smile was long gone. She was dead serious as they walked along the corridor past glass-walled editing and recording studios.
“It’s not just this one terrible tragedy, Andy,” she said. “There’s a war going on and we’re not covering it. There’s hardly a word about it anywhere in the media.”
“What do you expect? Nobody’s interested in a war between two corporations.”
“Nobody’s interested because we’re not giving them the news they need to get interested!”
They had reached Wajir’s office. He opened the door and gestured her inside. “No sense us fighting out in the hallway where everybody can hear us,” he said.
Edith walked in and took one of the big upholstered chairs in front of his wide, expansive desk of bioengineered teak. Instead of going to his swivel chair, Wajir perched on the edge of his desk, close enough to Edith to loom over her.
“We’ve been over this before, Edie. The news nets Earthside aren’t interested in the war. It’s all the way to hell out in the Asteroid Belt and it’s being fought by mercenaries and you know who the hell cares? Nobody. Nobody on Earth gives a damn about it.”
“But we should make them care about it,” she insisted.
“How?” he cried. “What do we have to do to get them interested? Tell me and I’ll do it.”
Edith started to snap out a reply, but bit it back. She looked up at Wajir, who was leaning over her, his ebony face twisted into a frown. He’s been a friend for a long time, she told herself. Don’t turn him into an enemy.
“Andy,” she said softly, “this disaster of the Starlight is only the tip of the iceberg. The war is spreading out of the Belt. It’s coming here, whether we like it or not.”
“Good. Then we can cover it.”
She felt her jaw drop with surprise, her brows hike up.
“I’m not being cynical,” he quickly explained. “We can’t get news coverage from the Belt.”
“If it’s the expense, maybe I could—”
Shaking his head vigorously, Wajir said, “It’s not the money. The Belt’s controlled by the corporations. Astro and HSS have it sewn up between them.”
“There are independents.”
“Yeah, but the war’s between Astro and HSS and neither one of them wants news reporters snooping around. They won’t talk to us here and they won’t ferry us out to the Belt.”
“Then I’ll go,” Edith heard herself say.
Wajir looked genuinely shocked. “You?”
“I used to be a reporter, back in the Stone Age,” she said, smiling for the first time.
“They won’t take you, Edie.”
“I’ll fly out on an independent ship,” she said lightly. “I’ll go to Chrysalis and interview the rock rats there.”
He pursed his lips, rubbed at his nose, looked up at the ceiling. “The big boys won’t like it.”
“You mean the big corporations?”
Wajir nodded.
“I don’t really care whether they like it or not. I’ll go out on an independent ship. Maybe Sam Gunn will give me a ride on one of his vessels.”
“If he’s got any left,” Wajir muttered. “This war is bankrupting him.”
“Again? He’s always going bankrupt.”
“Seriously, Edie,” he said, “this could be dangerous.” “Nobody’s going to hurt Douglas Stavenger’s wife. There are some advantages to being married to a powerful man.”
“Maybe,” Wajir admitted. “Maybe. But I don’t like this. I think you’re making a mistake.”
Damned if it isn’t the same guy who came to see me in my office, Pancho thought as she looked at the holographic image of the handsome Nairobi executive. She was in the office of the Astro base’s director, which he had lent her for the duration of her visit to the south polar facility. Leaning back in the creaking, stiffly unfamiliar chair, Pancho saw the man’s name spelled out beneath his smiling, pleased image: Daniel Jomo Tsavo.
“Ms. Lane,” he said, looking pleasantly surprised, “what an unexpected pleasure.”
He was just as good-looking as she remembered him, but now instead of wearing a conservative business suit he was in well-worn coveralls, with the edge of a palmcomp peeping out from his breast pocket. He gets his hands dirty, Pancho thought, liking him all the more for it.
“You’re the head of the Nairobi base?” Pancho asked him.
His smile turned brighter. “After my visit with you, my superiors assigned me to managing the construction of our facilities here.”
“I didn’t know,” said Pancho.
“I suppose they thought it was cheaper to keep me here than fly me back home,” he said, self-deprecatingly.
“So you’ve been down here at the south pole all this time.”
“Yes, that’s true. I had no idea you had come to the Mountains of Eternal Light,” Tsavo said.
“Came down to check out how my people are doing here,” she lied easily, “and thought maybe I could take a peek at how you’re getting along.”
“By all means! It would be an honor to have you visit our humble facility, Ms. Lane.”
She arched a brow at him. “Don’t you think you can call me Pancho by now?” He chuckled and looked away from her, seemingly embarra
ssed. “Yes, I suppose so … Pancho.”
“Good! When can I come over, Daniel?”
For a moment he looked almost alarmed, but he quickly recovered. “Urn, our facilities are not very luxurious, Pancho. We weren’t expecting illustrious visitors for some time, you see, and—”
“Can it, Danny boy! I can sleep on nails, if I have to. When can I come over?”
“Give me a day to tidy up a bit. Twenty-four hours. I’ll send a hopper for you.”
“Great,” said Pancho, recognizing that twenty-four hours would give him time to check with whoever his bosses were and decide how to handle this unexpected visit.
“By the way,” she added, “are you folks still interested in a strategic partnership with Astro Corporation?”
Now his face went almost totally blank. Poker-playing time, Pancho realized.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Of course. Although, you realize, with this war going on, the financial situation has changed a good deal.”
“Tell me about it!”
He smiled again.
“Okay, then, we can talk about it when I get to your base.”
“Fine,” said Daniel Jomo Tsavo.
DATA BANK: SOLAR FLARE
The minor star that humans call the Sun is a seething, restless million-kilometer-wide thermonuclear reactor. Deep in its core, where the temperature exceeds thirty million degrees, intact atoms cannot exist. They are totally ionized, their electrons stripped from their nuclei. Under those immense temperatures and pressures hydrogen nuclei—bare protons—are forced together to create nuclei of helium. This process of fusion releases particles of electromagnetic energy called photons, which make their tortuous way through half a million kilometers of incredibly dense ionized gas, called plasma, toward the Sun’s shining surface.
Furiously boiling, gigantic bubbles of plasma rise and sink again, cooling and reheating, in an endless cycle of convection. Immense magnetic fields play through the plasma, warping it, shredding it into slender glowing filaments longer than the distance between the Earth and its Moon. Vast arches of million-degree plasma form above the solar surface, expanding, hurling themselves into space or pouring back down into the Sun in titanic cascades.
